The present invention relates generally to visual display systems and, more specifically, to an apparatus and process for the selection and visual display of design components according to user-supplied criteria in a plurality of predetermined product categories.
The field of design component coordination encompasses wearing apparel, interior decoration, and a variety of other activities and relative products in which an end user selects or accepts recommendations as to harmonious visual elements. Those who work in such areas have long been burdened by complementary difficulties which inhibit growth and competition. These problems are, first, the explosion of catalog information provided by manufacturers for the use of the design consultant, and second, reticence on the part of the public concerning consultant services which the consumer perceives to be no different from what the consumer can achieve on his or her own efforts.
The sheer volume of catalog information and product samples offered to the design consultant presently makes the task of interior decoration akin to the proverbial finding of a needle in a haystack. The sheer physical volume of such materials typically overwhelms the office of the consultant and provides a misleading impression of disorganization. Morever, there is no uniform system of indexing for access to catalog information, so the design consultant is forced to rely on human memory to recall an upholstery, wallcovering or other product of appropriate visual characteristics and associate that item with a page or section in a particular manufacturer's catalog in order to locate related information as to price, fireproofing, availability and other factors. The disadvantages of such a system is readily apparent, for no human memory can encompass the hundreds of thousands of pages available to the design consultant in catalogs.
A consumer attitude survey has established that the average consumer has a negative attitude with regard to interior decoration consulting. The survey established that consumers offer two particular reasons for the negative attitude: first, that decoration consultants are perceived to charge high prices, and second, the consumer can select design elements to achieve results equally satisfying to those of a decoration consultant. The consumer attitude, of course, does not take into account the large volume of information which the design consultant is forced to maintain at hand, nor does it recognize the considerable expertise which is applied by the design consultant to extract appropriate information from the catalogs at hand suitable for a specific customer.
Therefore, to enable consumer design component selection, as well as to enhance the efficiency of design component consultants, it would be appropriate to provide a system for rapid access to the information heretofore available only through printed and material catalogs. Rather than relying on memory, which is at best inefficient and requires years of experience, such a system would allow the user to specify component criteria, for a variety of products and then rapidly display components meeting the stated criteria together with other relevant information for each displayed product component such as price, manufacturer, and catalog number. In addition, such a system may be provided for use by consumers within a retail establishment such as a department store, where the system could indicate whether a displayed item was in stock, back-ordered, or available only special order.
Until recent times, there has been no mechanism available for providing rapid access to a large selection of visual images. A design consultant might have utilized a general purpose digital computer programmed for database storage and retrieval to create an index for relevant information concerning catalog items, but heretofore such a computer system could not store or retrieve an image of each catalog item. The appearance of each item is, of course, at the core of the design process so any such computer system could find only limited use in the past.
However, the advent of random-access video disk display systems such as the optical videodisk system licensed by Phillips has made it possible to record an archive of product images for rapid collection and display under computer control. A line of videodisk players is available off-the-shelf from Pioneer Video, Inc. These and compatible systems available from Hitachi, Sylvania, Magnavox, Sony and others provide random-access of up to 54,000 still video images per disk side, with a worst-case access time as low as 2 seconds. Domestic pressing facilities for optical disks compatible with these systems are available through Pioneer and 3M Corporation. The United States Government and many corporations have taken advantage of this technology for education and training of employees and those who use their products or services. Additionally, a number of disks have been produced for use directly by the consumer in an entertainment or educational context.
The Pergammon timesharing network now offers a videodisk-based patent drawing retrieval system. One such terminal is presently installed in the Patent Search Room of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In this system, a local keyboard terminal facilitates full-text searching of text of patents recently issued, which database is maintained in a host computer remote from the terminal. The terminal displays text returned by the host, and is coupled to a videodisk player which displays a drawing corresponding to the text. This system does not permit searching for visual characteristics, such as color, pattern theme, pattern density, or texture, of the images recorded on videodisk. Thus the system has found use largely where the searcher concentrates on an abstract of each document, such as in certain chemical arts.
Among the first of the consumer-oriented disk systems as the 1981 Summer Catalog disk offered by Sears at no charge to its credit customers. This disk utilized a variety of the controls available on a typical videodisk player and illustrates the limitations as well as the advantages thereof. One limitation was the image resolution of a home television receiver on which the images were typically displayed. Due to this resolution difficulty, only a limited menu of alternatve selections could be provided on any one video frame. For the most part, the user would operate the player in a still-frame mode. The user would view a master menu frame, select a submenu and advance the player to an indicated frame for that submenu, and repeat the process until a frame or frames of actual product information display were indicated. Thus the user would normally advance through three or four levels of menu, and advancement would require manual entry of a four- or five-digit frame number, used by the player to locate and display the desired video frame bearing either menu text or product data. This system suffers from lack of flexibility in that it utilizes one prerecorded menu structure embodying a rigid presumption that the user conducted searches invariably and only by product type. Moreover, the disk displayed products only in representative colors and not in all avalable colors, so that any question of color availability, which is typically important in design coordination, could be answered only through manual inquiry with Sears employees.
Vidmax has offered another type of disk product for use on videodisk players in the home. Their Mystery Disk product series provides interactive detective fiction entertainment. In these products, a live-action play is presented in four acts. The user is directed by still-frame text to choose at random one of two paths at the beginning of each act, so that the drama structure is in effect a binary tree with sixteen possible outcomes. The path branch selection is implemented manually by directing the disk player to display a different presentation segment of live action, or a different soundtrack applied to a common live-action image sequence. At the completion of the four acts, the user is directed to select among supplemental still-frame images providing further clues to the solution of the mystery presented in the live-action play. Finally, the user is directed to compute a frame number based on his or her accusation as to a murderer, a motive, and a method, all of which are selected from still-frame menus recorded within the videodisk. By manually entering this computation into the controls of the disk player, the user is shown a frame which confirms or refutes the details of the accusation.
A similar system has been disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,333,152 in which the live-action segments terminate with one or more characters therein requested direction from the user. For instance, in the context of a western drama, a cowboy surrounded by indians might ask the viewer whether it would be more prudent to fight or to run. Here again, the disk player than branches to a subsequent program segment determined by the response of the user.
A number of arcade games have recently been introduced which allow the player to direct the progress of a character or vehicle by joystick input with an approximately realtime response. In order to enhance the illusion of reality and reduce the access time between program segments on the videodisk, the disk is recorded such that the most likely move of the user is closest to the current video frame on the disk. In some games, a general purpose digital computer is provided and programmed to control two disk players so that the second disk player is positioned to access the second most likely move of the user. Among the videodisk-based arcade games currently released are "Firefox" by Atari.
The J. P. Stevens Company has also utilized videodisk players as a catalog system for their fabric products. Their system has been placed in retail stores for use to determine availability of products, and provides only a single-key selection process. Thus a user can select on the basis of color identified by text input, or on the basis of price, but not on the basis of color and price simultaneously. This system clearly suffers from the critical defect of being insufficiently precise in its selection process for the needs of either the consumer or the design consultant.
The design consultant typically selects materials and products based on a variety of criteria, which may include scale and frequency of pattern, color, material, weave, price, special treatment (e.g., fireproofing), size, level of formality, finish, and credit terms, to name but a few of many. Not only will the specifics of these criteria vary from customer to customer but some customers may demand very specific characteristics for categories in which others are willing to accept wide variations. Thus the prior art fails to provide a visual display system which accommodates the need for flexibility in both selection of criteria categories and degree of specificity within categories. Without such flexibility, the prior art has found little or no acceptance among design consultants or consumers.